Man critical after QVB fall

Sydney siege: Inquest examines what ASIO knew

The inquest into the Martin Place siege is considering what information Australia's intelligence agencies had about Man Haron Monis before the deadly attack took place last year.

The third phase of the Lindt cafe inquest, which opened on Wednesday, is likely to be an uncomfortable one for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, if opening remarks by coroner Michael Barnes and his counsel assisting are any guide.

"All the world now knows that Monis was a dangerous deviant," Mr Barnes told the small army of lawyers assembled before him. "The questions the inquest must grapple with are: should ASIO have predicted his violent outburst, and could its methods be improved to make such predictions more reliable in the future."

Such questions take on fresh urgency in the wake of last week's carnage in Paris, where it has emerged that some of the attackers had been intermittently on the radar of authorities in France and Belgium for years.

None, though, drew attention to themselves in the manner of Monis, whose frequent, often self-initiated interactions with ASIO suggest some kind of weird obsession with that agency.

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Monis was interviewed by ASIO nearly a dozen times between his arrival here in 1996 and his death in the shootout with police inside the cafe in the early hours of December 16 last year.

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As counsel assisting the inquiry Jeremy Gormly, SC, wryly observed, many of his contacts or attempted contacts with ASIO "seemed to amount to little more than nuisance calls".

In February 2007 Monis even offered himself as an ASIO "source", helpfully providing a three-page plan of how he'd go about the business of being an undercover agent.

At that point, Mr Gormly says, ASIO quietly decided that "contact with Mr Monis should not be pursued" because of "concern about his motivation for contact, his unusual behaviour and that he had provided no information of security relevance so far."

In 2008, the agency took notice of him again after a spray of inflammatory statements but again concluded there was no reason to sound the alarm.

And despite 18 calls and emails to the National Security Hotline in the days immediately before the siege, neither ASIO nor the police saw an imminent threat. Yet it is too early to rush to judgment.